Republican presidential hopeful and former US President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a rally in Laconia, New Hampshire, January 22, 2024.
Timothy A. Clary | AFP | Getty Images
A draft resolution making its way through the Republican National Committee would declare Donald Trump the GOP’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee — even as his rival, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, is still vying for the nomination.
But Trump, in a Truth Social post Thursday evening, said that “for the sake of PARTY UNITY,” the RNC “should NOT go forward with this plan.”
Trump said he wants to “do it the ‘Old Fashioned’ way, and finish the process off AT THE BALLOT BOX.”
The two-page draft notes that Trump easily won the Iowa caucuses and Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, and that he leads in the polls of upcoming primary states, including Haley’s home state of South Carolina.
It argues, “any money spent from this moment forward in the primary process is better spent fighting the democrats by focusing on President Biden’s deadly border crisis, failed economic policies and disastrous and dangerous foreign policy.”
The document could come up next week at the committee’s winter meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to NBC News, which obtained a copy of the draft resolution from an RNC member.
While the RNC still requires a candidate to win a majority of state delegates in order to clinch the nomination, the resolution underscores the Republican Party’s increasing commitment to crowning Trump, not Haley, its champion against President Joe Biden in 2024.
The Dispatch, which first reported the resolution, said it was proposed by David Bossie, an RNC committeeman and deputy campaign manager for Trump’s 2016 White House bid. Bossie and the RNC did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
A spokeswoman for Haley in a statement told NBC, “Who cares what the RNC says? We’ll let millions of Republican voters across the country decide who should be our party’s nominee, not a bunch of Washington insiders.”
The spokeswoman added that if RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel “wants to be helpful she can organize a debate in South Carolina, unless she’s also worried that Trump can’t handle being on the stage for 90 minutes with Nikki Haley.”
